... depiction of the financial state of a business. Although this does however bring us to our first problem, which is indeed a general problem. The expectancy of accounts does vary considerably from country to country, therefore what is expected to be included in an account may vary. Therefore when comparing companies across international borders against market, financial or productive performance we may well struggle. For example we found it very difficult to obtain labour costs for companies inside the UK, whilst American companies appeared to be much more forthcoming in stating its cost of labour. But this can also occur in other areas of the accounts. E.g. number of employees, etc. We shall first look at the usefulness of financial accounts/reports in assessing the performance of a company productively. Obviously using the figures obtained from particular accounts there are a large number of methods in which we could analyse productive ...

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